One of the really nice things about this game is working with a community of heroes and general (I only KNOW of one general, but there might be more lurking). We have started to see more and more community art showing up and recently londonsmee has performed the heroic deed of creating a batch of nice banners using assets from the game. So take a look below (click to enlarge) and thanks ‘londonsmee’! :-)

Over the holidays I’ve mocked up a demo of a simple tool for creating custom unit-insignia for assault teams.

The idea is that you can create your own insignia for you assault team(s) and have them displayed both on the strategic view but also as decals on tanks/soldiers/airplanes in the action game. Obviously (being a f2p game) acquiring a unique insignia will come at a cost. The plan is that players can pay to lock a particular design so nobody else can use it. If you don’t care that others can use the same combination it will be cheaper.

The mockup is not final in any way and is just a design suggestion. This design will be iterated a few times before it goes into the game. I assume you guys out there have a few more layers you would like me to add :-)

After trying many different approaches we have implemented a new routine for drawing grass and cornfields on the terrain. The routine we have used so far has a few issues that we were not happy with. It is very hardware intensive which means that it can only be drawn close to the player and not in the distance. This is particularly bad when it is used for cornfields and high grass. Players will crouch down thinking that they are in cover in a corn field and in reality everyone can see them and shoot them.

I’ve finally created an ICE compound that will make it way easier to setup the powercables in the background. The compound takes 2 attach points (nulls or any other geometry) and a cylinder. The cylinder is then stretched between the points and bent. Simple stuff but the ‘old’ way of setting this up with spline extrusions was just too slow and cumbersome.

The Compound works well with the master-system/XSI-deltas so only one ‘base’ wire is needed for the entire game :-)

After Henning implemented the vector-to-scalars and the Vector_State->Intersection_Point this stuff is possible. The shader blends some green mushy algea stuff on the lower part of the object so the effect will always be in line with the water on the level no-matter where the the object is placed :-)